Thursday, December 22, 2016

Emotional Intelligence - don't waste your time - it's not a 'thing'

The L&D search for fads is always in search of bendwagons to jump on - long after they have left town. So
imagine their joy, in 1995, when ‘Emotional Intelligence’ hit HR with Daniel Goleman’s book ‘Emotional Intelligence’. (The term actual goes back to a 1964 paper
by Michael Beldoch and has more than a passing reference to Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences.) Suddenly, a
new set of skills could be used to deliver another batch of ill-conceived
courses, built on the back of no research whatsoever. But who needs research
when you have a snappy course title?

EI and performanceAt last we have some good research on the
subject which shows that the basic concept is flawed, that having EI is less of
an advantage than you think. Joseph et al. (2015) published a meta-analysis of
15 carefully selected studies, easily the best summary of the evidence so
far.What they found was a weak
correlation (0.29) with job performance. Note that 0.4 is often taken as a
reasonable benchmark for evidence of a strong correlation. To put this into
plain English, it means that EI has a predictive power on performance of only
8.4%.Put another way, if you’re
spending a lot of training effort and dollars on this, it is largely wasted. The
clever thing about the Joseph paper was their careful focus on actual job
performance, as opposed to academic tests and assessments. They cut out the
crap, giving it evidential punch.

EI is a bait and switch

What became
obvious as they looked at the training and tools, was that there was a bait and
switch going on. EI was not a thing-in-itself but an amalgam of other things,
especially good-old personality measures. When they unpacked six EI tests, they
found that many of the measures were actually personality measures, such as
conscientiousness, industriousness and self-control. These had been stolen from
other personality tests. So, they did a clever thing and ran the analysis
again, this time with controls for established personality measures. This is
where things got really interesting. The correlation between EI and job performance
dropped to a shocking -0.2.

Weasel word ‘emotional’

Like many
fads in HR, an intuitive error lies at the heart of the fad. It just seems intuitively
true that people with emotional sensibility should be better performers but a
moments thought will make you realize that many forms of performance may rely on
many other cognitive traits and competences. In our therapeutic age, it is all
too easy to attribute positive qualities to the word ‘emotional’ without really
examining what that means in practice. HR is a people profession, people who genuinely care, but when they bring their biases to bear on performance, as with many
other fads, such as learning styles, Maslow, Myers-Briggs, NLP and mindfulness,
emotion tends to trump reason. When it is examined in detail EI, like these
other fads, falls apart.

Weasel word ‘intelligence’

I have
written extensively about the danger in using the word ‘intelligence’, for example, in artificial intelligence. The danger with ‘emotional
intelligence’ is that a dodgy adjective pushes forward an even dodgier noun.
Give emotion the status of ‘intelligence’ and you give it a false sense of its
own importance. Is it a fixed trait, stable over time, that can be taught and
learned? Eysenck, the doyen of intelligence theorists, dismissed
Goleman’s definition of
‘intelligence’ and thought his claims were unsubstantiated. In truth the use of the word is misleading.

Bogus tests

Worse
still, EI has some tests that are shockingly awful. Tests often lie at the
heart of these fads, as they can be sold, practitioners trained and the whole
thing turned into pyramid selling - a Ponzi scheme.Practitioners, in this case are sometimes
called ‘emotional experts’ (I kid ye not), who administer and assess EI tests.
However, the main test, the MSCEIT, is problematic. First, the company
administering the tests (Multi-Health systems) was found by Føllesdal to be
peddling a pig with lipstick. To be precise, 19 of the 141 questions were
actually being scored wrongly. They quietly dropped the scoring on these
questions, while keeping them in the test. Reputations had to be maintained.
More fundamentally, the test is weak, as there are no correct answers, so it is
not anchored in any objective standard. As a consensus scored test, it has all
the haziness of a drifting, shape-shifting cloud.

EI and leadership

Goleman’s outrageous
claims, that general EI was twice as useful as either technical knowledge, or
general personality traits, has been dismissed as nonsense, as is his claim
that it accounts for 67% of superior, leadership performance. This undermines
lots of Leadership training, as EI is often used as a major plank in its
theoretical framework and courses. Føllesdal(2013) looked at test results
(MSCEIT) of 111 business leaders and compared these with the views of those
same leaders by their employees. Guess what – there was no correlation.

Conclusion

The whole sorry affair has all the hallmarks of
other HR fads – the inevitable popular book, paucity of research, exaggerated claims,
misleading language, the test, ignoring research that shows it is largely a
waste of training time. Don’t waste your time and money on this. There are far
better ways to assess and train employees if performance is your goal.For other Ponzi scheme fads see here.

3 Comments:

Excellent piece and would agree that HR has a serious problem with wanting to test and label people.

However, I would say that EI components are a useful way to have people consider their behaviors and values ("the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one's emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically").

I would never advocate that EI is a measure, but EI as a way to make people think about themselves and their approach to team working, line management, etc can be useful.